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And You Thought
American Schools Were Bad!

Updated Dec. 9, 1998 2:10 a.m. ET

By Theodore Dalrymple, which is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician.

M any Americans still believe that the English school system is superior to their own: The kids know more on the other side of the Atlantic. Alas, this is no longer the case, if it ever was. The English school system is now so bad that it is scarcely possible to imagine a worse one. Never has so little knowledge been imparted at such expense to so many for so long.

In eight years in medical practice in an English slum (in which lives, incidentally, a fifth of the population of the industrial English city where I work), I have met only one teenager of hundreds I have asked who knew when World War II was fought. The others thought it took place in the early 1900s or the 1970s, and lasted up to 30 years. Two placed it in the 18th century, which under the circumstances I considered something of an educational triumph. At least their answer displayed a vague awareness that there had been centuries other than their own.

When asked to name a British prime minister other than the incumbent or Margaret Thatcher, half of the nine out of 10 who are unable to do so explain their inability in precisely the same way: "I don't know, I wasn't born then." In other words, one can't be expected to know anything other than by personal acquaintance.

The name Shakespeare sometimes rings faint bells, sometimes not; about half know that he was a writer of some description, others know nothing at all about him, and one even wondered whether he was a composer.

It might be argued, I suppose, that this kind of knowledge is inessential to modern life, that it is perfectly possible to get by knowing nothing whatever of history or literature. I would disagree with that argument, seeing no reason why the ambition of educators should be to equip children to negotiate their future with the minimum mental equipment possible, or why children should be deliberately trapped in an eternal present by a total ignorance of the past.

Several teachers have told me that the vital thing in the information age is not to know a thing, but to know how and where to find it out. In my experience, however, those who know nothing are also completely unable to find anything out: They can scarcely read, and certainly do not make a habit of it. The vast majority of the youngsters between 16 and 20 in my area cannot read a short passage out loud with any facility. They stumble over unfamiliar or longer words, eventually giving up the struggle with an expression like, "I don't know that one," as if English were written ideographically rather than alphabetically. When asked to explain the meaning of what they have just read, many will also say, "I don't know, I was only reading it." In other words, the fact that they can pronounce some of the written words no more means they are able to read than does a parrot's imitations of the human voice mean that it is able to converse intelligently.

The level of numeracy is no higher. Young people in my area cannot multiply six by nine; even the answer to such sums as nine plus 12 often eludes them. Two have given me the answer 20; and when I told them this was nearly right, but not quite, they thought I was complimenting them and smiled happily at their unexpected success. One youth of 17, asked to multiply three by four, replied, "We didn't get that far."

This abysmally low level of education--scarcely equaled in the developing world, let alone the developed one--raises many interesting questions, not least that of how it is possible for children to go to school for 11 years as decreed by law and yet learn so little. Eleven years is surely ample time for children to learn their multiplication tables.

It is true that many if not most of them come from disastrous home circumstances (over two-thirds of the births in my hospital are illegitimate). Parents are often less than obsessionally interested in the physical welfare of their children, let alone in their education. Nevertheless, I find it impossible to believe that, using the right methods, Britain cannot do better than this--or, indeed, that we could do much worse. No child is fated to learn so little, and the school system has a lot to answer for.

But it's not just in slums where one finds evidence of the educational system's failure. The symptoms are present even in much better areas than the one in which I practice. A colleague of mine, who lives in a leafy, middle-class suburb, was horrified to discover that three of the 10 spellings that his young daughter was given weekly to learn in the local school were wrong, and that the teacher marked a piece of his daughter's work with the words, "Good, but you could of done it different." Wackford Squeers, the ignorant and brutal headmaster in Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby," would have been proud that some of his methods live on, as was the headmistress of the school who considered that the teacher's errors were insignificant. According to her, what was truly important was to encourage the children to express themselves uninhibited by the difficulties of English orthography.

Alarm has been expressed at the decline this year in the pass rate in public examinations for 16-year-olds, a decline that is all the more remarkable because the standard required to pass is already so low that it almost takes determination, ingenuity or preternatural ignorance to fail. But the fact is that even a rise in the pass rate would have to be greeted with equal alarm. For the educational establishment has long been engaged in statistical obfuscation by constantly changing the yardsticks, the better to disguise the educational catastrophe brought about by its criminally stupid experiments with children's lives.

The educational establishment has consistently denied that, contrary to common observation, standards have fallen; indeed, it has claimed that they have risen. But I have proof of a decline: When young people between 16 and 20 are given the cognitive test administered to old people to discover whether they are suffering from dementia, a high proportion of the youngsters are found to be already suffering from this mental deficiency. English schools give you Alzheimer's.